Digital Communications and Networks最新文献

Technologies of blockchain interoperability: A survey 区块链互操作技术综述

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.07.008

Haonan Yuan, Shufan Fei, Zheng Yan

Blockchain technology is increasingly popular and has been widely applied in many industrial fields, due to its unique properties of decentralization, immutability, and traceability. Blockchain systems in different fields vary, with different block structures, consensus mechanisms and access permission models. These differences make it hard for different blockchain systems to interoperate with each other, which isolates them. Cross-chain technologies have been developed to solve this isolation problem in order to improve the interoperability of blockchains. Although some surveys on cross-chain technologies can be found, they are unable to keep up with the latest research progress due to their extremely fast pace of development. Moreover, the literature misses general criteria to evaluate the quality of cross-chain technologies. In this paper, a comprehensive literature review of cross-chain technologies is conducted by employing a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria. The preliminaries on blockchain interoperability are first presented. Then, a set of evaluation criteria is proposed in terms of security, privacy, performance, and functionality. The latest cutting-edge works are reviewed based on the proposed taxonomy of cross-chain technologies and their performance is evaluated against our proposed criteria. Finally, some open issues and future directions of cross-chain research are pointed out.

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引用次数: 0

A pipelining task offloading strategy via delay-aware multi-agent reinforcement learning in Cybertwin-enabled 6G network 基于延迟感知多智能体强化学习的6G网络流水线任务卸载策略

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.04.004

Haiwen Niu , Luhan Wang , Keliang Du , Zhaoming Lu , Xiangming Wen , Yu Liu

Cybertwin-enabled 6th Generation (6G) network is envisioned to support artificial intelligence-native management to meet changing demands of 6G applications. Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) technologies driven by Cybertwins have been proposed for adaptive task offloading strategies. However, the existence of random transmission delay between Cybertwin-driven agents and underlying networks is not considered in related works, which destroys the standard Markov property and increases the decision reaction time to reduce the task offloading strategy performance. In order to address this problem, we propose a pipelining task offloading method to lower the decision reaction time and model it as a delay-aware Markov Decision Process (MDP). Then, we design a delay-aware MADRL algorithm to minimize the weighted sum of task execution latency and energy consumption. Firstly, the state space is augmented using the lastly-received state and historical actions to rebuild the Markov property. Secondly, Gate Transformer-XL is introduced to capture historical actions' importance and maintain the consistent input dimension dynamically changed due to random transmission delays. Thirdly, a sampling method and a new loss function with the difference between the current and target state value and the difference between real state-action value and augmented state-action value are designed to obtain state transition trajectories close to the real ones. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed methods are effective in reducing reaction time and improving the task offloading performance in the random-delay Cybertwin-enabled 6G networks.

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引用次数: 0

IncEFL: a sharing incentive mechanism for edge-assisted federated learning in industrial IoT IncEFL：工业物联网中边缘辅助联合学习的共享激励机制

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.05.001

Jiewei Chen , Shaoyong Guo , Tao Shen , Yan Feng , Jian Gao , Xuesong Qiu

As the information sensing and processing capabilities of IoT devices increase, a large amount of data is being generated at the edge of Industrial IoT (IIoT), which has become a strong foundation for distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. However, most users are reluctant to disclose their data due to network bandwidth limitations, device energy consumption, and privacy requirements. To address this issue, this paper introduces an Edge-assisted Federated Learning (EFL) framework, along with an incentive mechanism for lightweight industrial data sharing. In order to reduce the information asymmetry between data owners and users, an EFL model-sharing incentive mechanism based on contract theory is designed. In addition, a weight dispersion evaluation scheme based on Wasserstein distance is proposed. This study models an optimization problem of node selection and sharing incentives to maximize the EFL model consumers' profit and ensure the quality of training services. An incentive-based EFL algorithm with individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints is proposed. Finally, the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of positive incentives for contract design and performance analysis of EFL systems.

{"title":"IncEFL: a sharing incentive mechanism for edge-assisted federated learning in industrial IoT","authors":"Jiewei Chen , Shaoyong Guo , Tao Shen , Yan Feng , Jian Gao , Xuesong Qiu","doi":"10.1016/j.dcan.2023.05.001","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcan.2023.05.001","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As the information sensing and processing capabilities of IoT devices increase, a large amount of data is being generated at the edge of Industrial IoT (IIoT), which has become a strong foundation for distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications. However, most users are reluctant to disclose their data due to network bandwidth limitations, device energy consumption, and privacy requirements. To address this issue, this paper introduces an Edge-assisted Federated Learning (EFL) framework, along with an incentive mechanism for lightweight industrial data sharing. In order to reduce the information asymmetry between data owners and users, an EFL model-sharing incentive mechanism based on contract theory is designed. In addition, a weight dispersion evaluation scheme based on Wasserstein distance is proposed. This study models an optimization problem of node selection and sharing incentives to maximize the EFL model consumers' profit and ensure the quality of training services. An incentive-based EFL algorithm with individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints is proposed. Finally, the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of positive incentives for contract design and performance analysis of EFL systems.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48631,"journal":{"name":"Digital Communications and Networks","volume":"11 1","pages":"Pages 106-115"},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49557961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

Joint offloading decision and resource allocation in vehicular edge computing networks 车载边缘计算网络中的联合卸载决策与资源分配

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.03.006

Shumo Wang , Xiaoqin Song , Han Xu , Tiecheng Song , Guowei Zhang , Yang Yang

With the rapid development of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), many new applications for Intelligent Connected Vehicles (ICVs) have sprung up. In order to tackle the conflict between delay-sensitive applications and resource-constrained vehicles, computation offloading paradigm that transfers computation tasks from ICVs to edge computing nodes has received extensive attention. However, the dynamic network conditions caused by the mobility of vehicles and the unbalanced computing load of edge nodes make ITS face challenges. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) architecture with Task Vehicles (TaVs), Service Vehicles (SeVs) and Roadside Units (RSUs), and propose a distributed algorithm, namely PG-MRL, which jointly optimizes offloading decision and resource allocation. In the first stage, the offloading decisions of TaVs are obtained through a potential game. In the second stage, a multi-agent Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), one of deep reinforcement learning algorithms, with centralized training and distributed execution is proposed to optimize the real-time transmission power and subchannel selection. The simulation results show that the proposed PG-MRL algorithm has significant improvements over baseline algorithms in terms of system delay.

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引用次数: 0

A blockchain-based privacy-preserving and collusion-resistant scheme (PPCR) for double auctions 一种基于区块链的双重拍卖隐私保护和抗合谋方案(PPCR)

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.05.002

Xuedan Jia , Liangmin Wang , Ke Cheng , Pujie Jing , Xiangmei Song

Electronic auctions (e-auctions) remove the physical limitations of traditional auctions and bring this mechanism to the general public. However, most e-auction schemes involve a trusted auctioneer, which is not always credible in practice. Some studies have applied cryptography tools to solve this problem by distributing trust, but they ignore the existence of collusion. In this paper, a blockchain-based Privacy-Preserving and Collusion-Resistant scheme (PPCR) for double auctions is proposed by employing both cryptography and blockchain technology, which is the first decentralized and collusion-resistant double auction scheme that guarantees bidder anonymity and bid privacy. A two-server-based auction framework is designed to support off-chain allocation with privacy preservation and on-chain dispute resolution for collusion resistance. A Dispute Resolution agreement (DR) is provided to the auctioneer to prove that they have conducted the auction correctly and the result is fair and correct. In addition, a Concise Dispute Resolution protocol (CDR) is designed to handle situations where the number of accused winners is small, significantly reducing the computation cost of dispute resolution. Extensive experimental results confirm that PPCR can indeed achieve efficient collusion resistance and verifiability of auction results with low on-chain and off-chain computational overhead.

{"title":"A blockchain-based privacy-preserving and collusion-resistant scheme (PPCR) for double auctions","authors":"Xuedan Jia , Liangmin Wang , Ke Cheng , Pujie Jing , Xiangmei Song","doi":"10.1016/j.dcan.2023.05.002","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.dcan.2023.05.002","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Electronic auctions (e-auctions) remove the physical limitations of traditional auctions and bring this mechanism to the general public. However, most e-auction schemes involve a trusted auctioneer, which is not always credible in practice. Some studies have applied cryptography tools to solve this problem by distributing trust, but they ignore the existence of collusion. In this paper, a blockchain-based Privacy-Preserving and Collusion-Resistant scheme (PPCR) for double auctions is proposed by employing both cryptography and blockchain technology, which is the first decentralized and collusion-resistant double auction scheme that guarantees bidder anonymity and bid privacy. A two-server-based auction framework is designed to support off-chain allocation with privacy preservation and on-chain dispute resolution for collusion resistance. A Dispute Resolution agreement (DR) is provided to the auctioneer to prove that they have conducted the auction correctly and the result is fair and correct. In addition, a Concise Dispute Resolution protocol (CDR) is designed to handle situations where the number of accused winners is small, significantly reducing the computation cost of dispute resolution. Extensive experimental results confirm that PPCR can indeed achieve efficient collusion resistance and verifiability of auction results with low on-chain and off-chain computational overhead.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48631,"journal":{"name":"Digital Communications and Networks","volume":"11 1","pages":"Pages 116-125"},"PeriodicalIF":7.5,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45703781","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

引用次数: 0

8K Ultra HD TV broadcast system: Challenge, architecture and implementation 8K超高清电视广播系统：挑战、架构和实现

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.06.001

Jiang Bi , Lidong Wang , Ge Guo

The size of the Audio and Video (AV) content of the 8K program is four times larger than that of 4K content, providing viewers with a more ideal audiovisual experience while placing higher demands on the capability and efficiency of document preparation and processing, signal transmission, and scheduling. However, it is difficult to meet the high robustness requirements of 8K broadcast services because the existing broadcast system architecture is limited by efficiency, cost, and other factors. In this study, an 8K Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) TV program broadcast scheme was designed. The verification results show that the scheme is high quality, highly efficient, and robust. In particular, in the research, the file format normalizing module was first placed in the broadcast area instead of the file preparation area, and the low-compression transmission scheme of the all-IP signal JPEG XS was designed in the signal transmission area for improving the efficiency of the scheme. Next, to reduce the impact on the robustness of broadcast services, the broadcast control logic of the broadcast core components is optimized. Finally, a series of 8K TV program broadcasting systems have been implemented and their performance has been verified. The results show that the system meets the efficiency and robustness requirements of a high-quality 8K AV broadcast system, and thus has a high degree of practicability.

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引用次数: 0

Novel MITM attack scheme based on built-in negotiation for blockchain-based digital twins 基于区块链数字双胞胎内置协商的新型 MITM 攻击方案

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.11.011

Xin Liu , Rui Zhou , Shohei Shimizu , Rui Chong , Qingguo Zhou , Xiaokang Zhou

As smart contracts, represented by Solidity, become deeply integrated into the manufacturing industry, blockchain-based Digital Twins (DT) has gained momentum in recent years. Most of the blockchain infrastructures in widespread use today are based on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism, and the process of creating blocks is known as “mining”. Mining becomes increasingly difficult as the blockchain grows in size and the number of on-chain business systems increases. To lower the threshold of participation in the mining process, “mining pools” have been created. Miners can cooperate and share the mining rewards according to the hashrate they contributed to the pool. Stratum is the most widely used communication protocol between miners and mining pools. Its security is essential for the participants. In this paper, we propose two novel Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack schemes against Stratum, which allow attackers to steal miners' hashrate to any mining pool using hijacked TCP connections. Compared with existing attacks, our work is more secretive, more suitable for the real-world environment, and more harmful. The Proof-of-Concept (PoC) shows that our schemes work perfectly on most mining softwares and pools. Furthermore, we present a lightweight AI-driven approach based on protocol-level feature analysis to detect Stratum MITM for blockchain-based DTs. Its detection model consists of three layers: feature extraction layer, vectorization layer, and detection layer. Experiments prove that our detection approach can effectively detect Stratum MITM traffic with 98% accuracy. Our work alerts the communities and provides possible mitigation against these more hidden and profitable attack schemes.

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引用次数: 0

Container cluster placement in edge computing based on reinforcement learning incorporating graph convolutional networks scheme 基于图卷积网络增强学习的边缘计算容器簇布局

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.02.012

Zhuo Chen, Bowen Zhu, Chuan Zhou

Container-based virtualization technology has been more widely used in edge computing environments recently due to its advantages of lighter resource occupation, faster startup capability, and better resource utilization efficiency. To meet the diverse needs of tasks, it usually needs to instantiate multiple network functions in the form of containers interconnect various generated containers to build a Container Cluster (CC). Then CCs will be deployed on edge service nodes with relatively limited resources. However, the increasingly complex and time-varying nature of tasks brings great challenges to optimal placement of CC. This paper regards the charges for various resources occupied by providing services as revenue, the service efficiency and energy consumption as cost, thus formulates a Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) model to describe the optimal placement of CC on edge service nodes. Furthermore, an Actor-Critic based Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) incorporating Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) framework named as RL-GCN is proposed to solve the optimization problem. The framework obtains an optimal placement strategy through self-learning according to the requirements and objectives of the placement of CC. Particularly, through the introduction of GCN, the features of the association relationship between multiple containers in CCs can be effectively extracted to improve the quality of placement. The experiment results show that under different scales of service nodes and task requests, the proposed method can obtain the improved system performance in terms of placement error ratio, time efficiency of solution output and cumulative system revenue compared with other representative baseline methods.

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引用次数: 0

Towards intelligent and trustworthy task assignments for 5G-enabled industrial communication systems 为支持 5G 的工业通信系统实现智能、可信的任务分配

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.11.003

Mingfeng Huang , Anfeng Liu , Neal N. Xiong , Athanasios V. Vasilakos

With the unprecedented prevalence of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and 5G technology, various applications supported by industrial communication systems have generated exponentially increased processing tasks, which makes task assignment inefficient due to insufficient workers. In this paper, an Intelligent and Trustworthy task assignment method based on Trust and Social relations (ITTS) is proposed for scenarios with many tasks and few workers. Specifically, ITTS first makes initial assignments based on trust and social influences, thereby transforming the complex large-scale industrial task assignment of the platform into the small-scale task assignment for each worker. Then, an intelligent Q-decision mechanism based on workers' social relation is proposed, which adopts the first-exploration-then-utilization principle to allocate tasks. Only when a worker cannot cope with the assigned tasks, it initiates dynamic worker recruitment, thus effectively solving the worker shortage problem as well as the cold start issue. More importantly, we consider trust and security issues, and evaluate the trust and social circles of workers by accumulating task feedback, to provide the platform a reference for worker recruitment, thereby creating a high-quality worker pool. Finally, extensive simulations demonstrate ITTS outperforms two benchmark methods by increasing task completion rates by 56.49%-61.53% and profit by 42.34%-47.19%.

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引用次数: 0

In-band full-duplex MIMO PLC systems for relaying networks 用于中继网络的带内全双工MIMO PLC系统

IF 7.5 2区计算机科学 Q1 TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Digital Communications and Networks

Pub Date : 2025-02-01 DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2023.05.005

Francisco J. Cañete , Gautham Prasad , Lutz Lampe

In Power Line Communications (PLC), there are regulatory masks that restrict the transmit power spectral density for electromagnetic compatibility reasons, which creates coverage issues despite the not too long distances. Hence, PLC networks often employ repeaters/relays, especially in smart grid neighborhood area networks. Even in broadband indoor PLC systems that offer a notable data rate, relaying may pave the way to new applications like being the backbone for wireless technologies in a cost-effective manner to support the Internet-of-things paradigm. In this paper, we study Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) PLC systems that incorporate in-band full-duplex functionality in relaying networks. We present several MIMO configurations that allow end-to-end half-duplex or full-duplex operations and analyze the achievable performance with state-of-the-art PLC systems. To reach this analysis, we get channel realizations from random network layouts for indoor and outdoor scenarios. We adopt realistic MIMO channel and noise models and consider transmission techniques according to PLC standards. The concepts discussed in this work can be useful in the design of future PLC relay-aided networks for different applications that look for a coverage extension and/or throughput: smart grids with enhanced communications in outdoor scenarios, and “last meter” systems for high-speed connections everywhere in indoor ones.

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引用次数: 0